First Diane system in U.S. sold to Luzerne County, Pennsylvania

Rich Ratajcak gets credit for another first - the first Diane system sold in the U.S. will upgrade a GCOS7 mainframe to the new Diane technology.

Rich said "In addition to power and openness, the Diane system will provide the opportunity to implement GWEB solutions in the county environment."

"With Gweb running on the open side of Diane, County employees will now be able to access legacy applications via their Web browser right from their PCs"

The cooperation between Bull and G&R has blossomed in the last few years. We have many joint development and marketing efforts, and the G&R products are routinely qualified on the new Bull hardware and software platforms. The G&R developers receive early shipments of the Bull platforms and pre-qualify all of the products, then the Bull teams take over for integration testing.

Our own G&R qualification teams are welcomed to the Bull test centers for full scale qualification and performance testing. G&R technology is used by Bull performance measurement people to stress test the mainframe systems. To stress test a GCOS mainframe you need the most efficient GCOS access software available in the market, and that comes from G&R.

This symbiosis has been beneficial to both parties, and particularly to the customers. We see that G&R products such as Glink for Windows, Glink for Java, Gweb and Ggate running on open systems really stimulate the GCOS customers to view their GCOS systems as easily accessible and valuable resources for their own employees in their corporate intranet, for their partners in their extranet, or even for the general public over the Internet. This open view of GCOS systems will be further enhanced with the announcement of the Bull/G&R J2EE compliant Connector for connecting Application server based e-business systems to the mainframe systems.

This marketing stimulus is becoming stronger as the Bull GCOS mainframe system technology is provided within an open architecture, so that the G&R servers can run within the GCOS system itself.

Even so, this is absolutely the first time that we have seen the sale of a GCOS upgrade system directly tied to the availablility of a G&R product running on the 'open' side of the new Bull platforms.

GlinkWeb is an exten­sion to the Glink pro­duct fam­ily that gives web users access to main­frame ap­pli­cations from their browsers, with­out the need for addi­tio­nal soft­ware on the client workstation.